Severance
by lionesseyes13
Summary: A oneshot exploring Vau's reaction when Delta squad informs him of Sev's disappearance on Kashyyyk.


Severance

I was sitting in what passed for the lounge area on Skirata's hybrid ship-boat vessel when my comm chimed, indicating an incoming message. Recognizing the frequency of the caller as belonging to Boss, I answered. Instantly, swarming in a blue miniature above my wrist, stood Boss, who looked as if he had recently been swallowed and spat out by a black hole.

My stomach knotted, knowing that whatever could make Boss, a man as tough as durasteel forged into a tool of war since his decanting, look so battered had to be heart-stoppingly and world-shatteringly bad news.

Trying to distract myself, I glanced at Scorch and Fixer, who were arrayed on either side of their sergeant, but their appearance wasn't about to improve my morale. Fixer, always so focused, unemotional, and disciplined, had buried his head in his hands and didn't seem inclined to lift it any time in the immediate future. Meanwhile, Scorch, biting on his lip so hard that it was impossible not to imagine it was bleeding, stared straight ahead, as if reliving over and over some past horror.

"Report, Boss," I ordered tersely, needing to know right away what was wrong, and trying not to notice Sev's absence. After all, Sev could have been anywhere, doing any number of things—keeping watch, catching up on sleep, or fetching a round of caf for the squad, who were all obviously in need of a pick-me-up beverage. "What's happened?"

"I—I don't know how to begin, Sarge." Boss' voice was broken, and I felt my unease climb up yet another level. No matter how awful things had been in the past, Boss had never stammered, which meant that, whatever the situation was, it was worse than anything the seasoned leader of the most effective special ops squad in the galaxy had encountered. That revelation was anything but comforting.

"Just tell me," I said, feeling as if my tongue had been replaced by a Tatooine desert. "Taking a long time to spit it out won't make it any better."

"It's _really _bad, Sarge." Boss' eyes were wide and wet as he gazed into the comm, and, again, I shoved away internal questions of what could have reduced such a hardened veteran to such a dismal state.

"_How _bad?" I demanded crisply, trying to conceal my anxiety, because I knew that the more my boys stalled in telling me something, the worse it was. "Give me a category."

"Oh, I'm not sure you have a category for this." Boss made a weird rasping nose probably intended to serve as a bitter laugh. "Sev's MIA. I really screwed up this time, sir."

"What?" I asked, the word MIA echoing in my head and failing to make sense. Sev couldn't be MIA, not when he was the best sniper I had ever met, and one of the fiercest warriors in the galaxy. Yet, I could already feel my heard crying out: not Sev, because he's not just anyone; he's my son. It sounded like another variation of the eternal lament of all parents who lost a child in combat.

"Sev's MIA," Boss repeated, and, with those words, I felt my universe spin out of control into a different space-time continuum, where I was simultaneously frozen in the present horror and stuck in the past. A hundred memories that I refused to believe that were all I had left of Sev were racing back to me in no particular order.

Sev picking up a DC-17 for the first time. Sev grunting in satisfaction as he took out one target after another in record time in training. Sev polishing the armaments for his DC-17 in celebration of a well-done exercise. Sev mocking Scorch and being told by Fixer to keep the frequency clear of chatter. Sev gobbling down spiced warra nut after spiced warra nut during the anti-terrorist op on Triple Zero. Sev growing impatient with the slow nature of that mission, and it's abysmally low addition to his kill count, wanting Skirata to promise that they would be able to slot the bad guys. With that memory, Sev's voice rose like a battle cry inside my head: _"We like dead. Dead is very us." _

No Sev, I thought. Dead is not _any _of you. Dead doesn't suit you at all.

"I'm so sorry," Boss went on, and I knew that the only reason he dared to apologize when I was prone to smacking clones who apologized for failure was because light-years separated us. "It's all my fault, sir. I never should have left him, or ordered Fixer and Scorch to do so, but Master Yoda commanded us to. We were needed to spearhead a major attack. We accomplished our mission, but we abandoned Sev."

"You did what I taught you to do," I answered, thinking that, in Boss' situation, there had been only wrong decisions and no right ones to make. Whatever he had chosen, he would have been kicking himself in the sheb for it later. "You put your duty first and yourselves last. You saved the lives of many troopers by leading the attack. You had the strength to obey orders even though it cost you everything you had. You were willing to sacrifice anything for the Republic. Don't apologize for being the perfect, obedient soldiers you were bred to be, because that makes you braver and more selfless than ninety-five percent of the scum inhabiting this galaxy. Do you understand, or do I have to draw you a picture?"

"The picture would help, Sarge." Scorch spoke for the first time and without a trace of irony. "Sev did his duty, and all it got him was a not exactly coveted place on the Republic's MIA list. We realize more than anybody that duty is about doing what you have to when you least want to, but why do we owe anything to a government that has given us nothing except what we need to fight and die and has no intention of giving us so much as a credit when this war is over? Why should we give everything—maybe even our lives and the lives of our brothers—to a Republic that taught us in training that we didn't matter and only the mission did?"

"Exactly, sir," agreed Fixer, finally lifting his head out of his palms to reveal a face twisted by grief and guilt. "They had the Kaminoans tell us while we were gestating in vats that it didn't matter whether we lived or died as long as we did our duty to the Republic and achieved our mission. Now, we get to see that principle in action as never before: we achieved the mission, and nobody except us cares whether Sev lived or died. It's a textbook example of a perfect end for a clone, so why should we pursue perfection any longer? Why shouldn't we rebel and have a fighting chance of saving ourselves?"

That was the longest speech I had ever heard Fixer give. Normally, more than a sentence was his equivalent of babbling, and I had definitely never heard him advocating defiance. From the time he had learned to talk, he had argued for strict adherence to the rules and established procedures.

"We thought that only losers died in battle, so we always tried to be the winners," Boss added grimly, "but we won on Kashyyyk, and Sev might be dead, so what's the point of winning?" Miserably, he shook his head. "We can't live with these doubts, Sarge. What are we going to do?"

"You're going to get some sleep and put some rations into your systems," I said sternly. "Then, when you've had time to think things though, we'll discuss all your career options, and you can decide how you want to proceed with your lives."

"I'm so tired, I can't sleep, sir," Scorch muttered, and I thought that it was crazy how we all felt so much for Sev and yet we could barely say a word about the gaping holes his absence left in our lives. All of us could only scream his name inside our heads repeatedly, knowing nobody, least of all Sev, could hear.

"And I feel sick just thinking about eating, Sarge," Fixer put in, plainly testing out his new revolutionary tendencies, instead of knocking other squad members into shape, which was what a second-in-command should have been doing.

"Boss." I focused my most serious look on Delta's sergeant, willing him, at least, to listen to reason. "Get these idiots to do as I say before they collapse from exhaustion or die of hunger."

"Consider it done, Sarge." Boss just seemed relieved to have somebody he trusted telling him what to do. Then, as if in a hurry to speak everything on his mind before he lost his nerve, he continued, the words spilling out of him in a rush, "MIA doesn't mean dead, so I was wondering if you would be willing to go to Kashyyyk and search for Sev. Fixer, Scorch, and I want to return for him, but we don't know when we'll be able to do so, and we'd hate to be too late. We know we don't have a right to ask anything of you, but would you please at least think about it?"

"Sev is my son," I said, not referring to him in the past tense, because he wasn't dead and was out there somewhere, fighting and roaring like a krayt dragon. "I guess that means I have to play hide-and-seek with him at least once, or I won't be in the running for any Father-of-the-Year awards. I'll be banging out for Kashyyyk as soon as I'm packed, and I can find transport."

No point, I thought, in telling them that I would have torn apart the known universe looking for just one of my sons if he were lost, because they were mine, and I was going to keep them as said as I could, no matter how many battlefields they stepped onto.

"Thank you, sir." Boss looked as if the weight of the galaxy had unexpectedly been removed from his shoulders. "You know, you've always been jatne'buir to us."

"Flattery," I pointed out wryly, "is utterly unnecessary when I'm already giving you what you want, ad'ika."

I didn't add that I truly was flattered that one of my commandos had finally dared to refer to me as buir, nonetheless the best one, although, of course, I would never believe that of myself. Better than any of my batch could have, I recognized that I was far from the best father, but I was the only one that Sev had, and I would have to do in a pinch, such as when he needed to be found when he was MIA.


End file.
